Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is a promising technology that
allows groups of vehicles to form in automated tightly-coupled platoons. CACC
schemes exploit Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) wireless communications to exchange
kinematic information among adjacent vehicles. However, the use of
communication networks brings security concerns as cyberattacks could access
the vehicles' internal networks and computers to disrupt their operation and
even cause crashes. In this manuscript, we present a sensitivity analysis of
standard CACC schemes against a class of resource-limited attacks. We present a
modelling framework that allows us to systematically compute outer ellipsoidal
approximations of reachable sets induced by attacks. We use the size of these
sets as a security metric to quantify the potential damage of attacks entering
the dynamics at different points and study how two key system parameters
(sampling and headway constant) change these metrics. We carry out the latter
sensitivity analysis for two different controller implementations (as given the
available sensors there is an infinite number of realizations of the same
controller) and show how different implementations can significantly affect the
impact of attacks. We present extensive simulation experiments to illustrate
our ideas